Why Buying Music Legally Still Kinda Sucks

For some reason, I take some small amount of pleasure in buying music legally. It’s not just because most people my age have devalued digital media to such a point that they don’t even pause before downloading an entire album illegally – a friend of mine recently told me that she wanted to “preview a song to see if it was worth pirating the whole album”, sheesh – but it’s something more than that. I guess it’s the same reason I liked buying albums on CD when I was a kid, I liked listening to new music that I had seemingly earned by saving the money to buy it (if that makes any sense at all).

The biggest incentive for me to buy music legally is that, nowadays, I can get it in the format I want (high quality digital MP3 downloads) and without some company’s DRM restricting what devices I can play it on. This lets me grab new music on a whim, then put it on my iPod or phone and use it on my own terms. Both Amazon and iTunes offer DRM-free music, and I’ve always considered us consumers to be very lucky to have these options available.

Even though many improvements have been made to give paying customers access to the content they want, there are still some pitfalls. In fact, a recent experience using the Amazon MP3 store taught me something important: buying music legally still kinda sucks.

My story is pretty simple. The Amazon MP3 store was running a deal on several 100-song classical music collections for under $5.00. I jumped on the deal and bought three of them (hey, classical is great to listen to when doing homework, programming, or writing this article). I started to notice some problems almost immediately, though. Amazon requires that you use their MP3 dowloader application to retrieve your purchased music, and it apparently doesn’t handle large quantities of songs very well.

The first album I purchased downloaded completely, but the next two stalled and eventually failed after completing only about ten songs. Thinking this was no big deal, I tried restarting the downloads, only to find that my download “ticket” expired after the download had been initiated. Dang.

I wrote to Amazon’s customer service explaining the situation, and they were quick to reply and re-enabled my downloads. They also pointed me to a site where I could start downloading the album again.

There was just one problem: I couldn’t find the “Download All” link, and there were alot of songs.

Hey, what do I have going on anyway?

So I wrote back to Amazon,

Thank you for the help with my recent Amazon MP3 downloading problem.

My concern is that I have to download each of these songs, track-by-track? There are 200+ songs and I would much prefer not having to spend the next hour clicking, saving, and opening files.

Thanks,

Evan

To which I received the unfortunate reply,

I’m sorry, currently there is no feature to download all the tracks at one click on Your Media Library.

It is always important for us to hear how customers react to all aspects of shopping at Amazon.com. Strong customer feedback like yours helps us continue to improve the selection and service we provide, and we appreciate the time you took to write to us. I’ve passed your comments as a feedback to the Amazon MP3 Music team.

Thank you for your interest in Amazon MP3 Music Downloads.

I’m not complaining about Amazon’s customer service here, because they were fast and seemingly sympathetic. But the fact that I have 200+ songs that I own but don’t have easy access to sitting in a huge list on some Amazon download page is ridiculously shortsighted of whoever is running the content management section of Amazon’s MP3 store.

I purchased these albums in June, and it’s now the end of September and I haven’t even made a dent in the list yet. It’s not entirely because I’m lazy (well, kinda), but I’ve been patiently hoping that Amazon would simply add a Download All button to mitigate these problems in the future.

A nerd like me could just as well write a script in AutoHotkey or iMacros for Firefox to make fairly quick work of this problem, but what about the average consumer? After all, those are the ones that truly need the most streamlined purchasing process possible to keep them away from piracy. Fiascoes like this only give them another reason to learn about BitTorrent.

A good rule for sites selling audio/video: if it’s faster or easier for customers to get the same content on bittorrent or similar sites/services, you’re probably doing it wrong, and need to start over.

Me

use IDM (internet download manager). It will download all links on a page in a single click

Dude, Firefox has an add-on that downloads all the links on a page. You can even put extention filters on it. I think it’s called DownloadThemAll.

Heath

It would take a programmer maybe 10 hours to create this button without any bugs and fully tested.

Just another dude

I had almost the exact same experience. It is interesting because I bought an album on itunes and it failed to download and I had a refund that night, outside of business hours, and complete. I normally love Amazon, but the support email cannot be replied to and is a form letter (obviously this level of service seems to be okay with them). For the first time in about two years, I have a pretty negative view of Amazon. I used to buy all of my computer hardware for the company I work for at Newegg, lately it has been Amazon, but the lack of service here has me thinking of going back.

JVOnStetten

Love this! 🙂

Chris

Amazon made not using their downloader really really annoying. I use the latest version of Ubuntu, but of course that’s not supported fully. Even though there are programmers living in their basements at their parents house with multiple linux applications as part of the Ubuntu repository- Amazon can’t find the 3 days to write a decent comparable app.

Anyway, directly downloading an mp3 is no longer allowed from what I can tell. When purchasing something you’ve got to download an .amz file then the ‘amazon downloader’ needs to import it and download it for you.

In my situation, I’ve got to switch to a XP vm, install the stupid downloader, then find the songs, download them in the downloader, then transfer them back to my main desktop. Its all very annoying.

I used to be able to download entire albums in a few seconds using the firefox extension ‘downloadthemall’ . It was logical, fast and simple.

Now I’ve got to do things the crappy way thanks to them taking away the ability to ‘right click-save file as’.

It wouldn’t surprise me that instead of using mp3’s that are DRM, that their download tracks your machine somehow, if you start sharing songs – they use it to track you. I have not proof of this nor, do I want to take the time to check it, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Again cheers to Amazon for taking away the simplest and fastest of options in favour of the another crappy system tray app for there wonderfully unique mp3 file format. Take way the option to use free software that was written five years ago+ that works better.

The other says he had an option to download all his previous songs, apparently that’s disabled in my amazon control panel. All the ‘download’ links are remapped to take me back to my orginal mp3’s to repurchase everything. Whooho!!

Just wondering if you ever got to download all these songs! I’m reading up about various legal download options and stumbled across this old article. Hopefully things have improved a lot with Amazon since.

MadFerret9

what’s amazing is that I’m reading this article in 2015, and there is still no Download All feature.. it takes way too many clicks to download an album. I even asked there support member and it’s not possible.

intrr

Yep, still valid in 2017. Anytime I try to buy MP3s from Amazon, I get all kinds of “Payment information invalid” error messages, even though I bought items for 1000s of dollars with that exact payment information.